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Greetings and salutations.

Assuming that with some PODs no earlier than the US annexation of N. Mexico the US somehow manages to scrape through the 19th century without north-south tensions ever turning into full-blown war. The boll weevil, British and French tariffs favoring Indian and Egyptian cotton vs. Confederate, the shrinking number of slaves in border states, increased hostility by Southern free labor to slaves taking over factory jobs, universal condemnation by everyone including the Sultan of Turkey and the Czar of Russia, etc. all leads to a slow decline in slavery by the late 1800's, leading to abolition by the 1920s (South Carolina and Georgia secede, and rejoin the nation after some saber-rattling and fourteen very embarassing months of economic collapse).

Now, what are the larger effects of this on the US and world? As the number of freed slaves grows, will they be able to find share-cropper type jobs as OTL, or will the continued existence of those still in bondage lead to their being hounded out of the Deep South - and if so, where will they go? An earlier move North? (Unlikely to please). The British Empire? More settlement in Liberia? Settled as frontier marchers in the coldest and most Indian-infested areas of the north central territories?

Will the lack of a civil war - which was watched with interest by a lot of foreign observers - mean differences in European military strategy, with possible butterflies for *68 and *70? Is the use of the ironclad delayed? And what of the effects on the US government? Much of the centralization of the war was reversed during subsequent decades, but just how loose will the Union be in the subsequent decades, in which the unity of the country has not been reaffirmed with loads of state violence?

Will a US which still has slave states fail to intervene in Cuba (and therefore the Phillipines) given the lurking possibility that the still slave-holding Deep South might try to annex it? What are US relations with the UK like, given that the UK will continue to sneer at the whole slavery thing? Will the end of slavery in Brazil be delayed by the US example? Will there be a push for US influence in Africa when the colonial rush heats up? After all, Southerners "know how to deal with black people"...

Just how much worse will racism and social darwinsim be in this TL, as southern intellectuals work hard to reinforce the notion of black people as inherently inferior and basically incapable of self-rule? How much worse a system of "Jim Crow" is set up in the wake of slavery? Or do we get systems of control quite unlike OTL?

If butterflies do not prevent the formation of the Prussian-led German empire, what odds the US would be involved on the non-German side of a *WWI?

Bruce
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